Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Some things democrats say are pure parody, except that they mean them seriously. Democrat Chris Murphy, (D Ct.) of the senate Foreign Relations Committee said that. You have to see it to believe it.

Really now, does he think we are that stupid? Or is HE that stupid. Don't these people even try to learn about a subject before they pontificate on it? This is a man who is on an important committee that, among other things, takes a leading role in creating policy.

Monday, March 10, 2014

American foreign policy is more sitcom than CENTCOM. That in a way is
the good news. Our failures are comic while those of other nations are
tragic. Americans do not understand the tragic impulses of other peoples
because they are exceptional. The Europeans failed as nationalists, and
are failing as post-nationalists.

Because Americans are not an ethnicity but a union of immigrants
committed to a concept, our nationalism discloses a universal impulse.
We blunder when we forget how exceptional we are, and ignore the tragic
impulses that impinge on other peoples.

Only once in the past century have we read the world aright. We got it
wrong when Woodrow Wilson proposed a utopian postwar vision in 1919,
when the isolationists tried to stay out of the European conflict in the
late 1930s, when Roosevelt and Truman let Stalin absorb Eastern Europe,
when we overextended and then turned tail in Vietnam, and when we undertook to turn
Iraq and Afghanistan into Western-style democracies. Ronald Reagan got
it right when he decided that it was time to roll back communism - but
he also understood that we would have to live with Russia as a nation.

We have stumbled into the world's troubles like incongruous clowns in a
tragedy: we observe the anguished faces of the other characters and
conclude that everyone else on stage is insane. That is how Americans
view Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Time magazine reported last week:

An Obama administration official leaked to the New York Times on Sunday
the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel told President Obama she
wasn't sure if Putin was in touch with reality. "In another world,"
Merkel reportedly said, according to the leak. Then in a conference call
with reporters later in the day, three administration officials took
turns firing rhetorical shots: "[B]eing inside Putin's head is not
someplace anyone wants to be."

I doubt that Merkel ever said it, but that's a different question. Russia, as Colonel Ralph Peters
(retired) told Sean Hannity last week, "believes in Russia"; to the
Obamoids, belief in one's country is prima facie evidence of mental
defect. Hillary Clinton, Senator John McCain and Senator Marco Rubio
meanwhile compare Putin to Hitler, an example of what the late Leo
Strauss derided as "reduction ad Hitlerium".

Contrast that to President Obama's characterization of Iran in his interview with Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg:

[If] you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they're not
impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they
respond to costs and benefits.

Just how does one define rationality in global politics? Here is a
question that helps: What is the rational self-interest of a nation that
will cease to exist within the horizon of present-day expectations? We
look uncomprehendingly on the petty wars of perished peoples and marvel
at the sheer vanity of their forgotten battles. How do we know that
someone in the future won't look back at us the same way? There have
been Great Extinctions of the Peoples before in world history, but never
with the breadth and speed of the demographic declines in our own era.
That should give us something of an objective gauge with which to judge
the rationality of actors.

Iran's unprecedented fertility decline has accelerated - from about 7
children per female in 1979 to only 1.6 last year, according to a UN
estimate. Russia, meanwhile, is struggling to emerge from what seemed
like a demographic death-sentence only a few years ago. Ukraine is
Europe's poster-boy for demographic death.

Iran is dying a slow and dreadful death: by mid-century more than a
third of its people will be over 60, and by the end of the century, half
its people will be over 60, imposing an impossible burden on a poor
country. Its rulers are taking urgent steps to reverse the fertility
decline, opening clinics to treat infertility, which reportedly affects
one-fifth of all Iranian couples, against a world average of around 8%.
Why infertility is so widespread in Iran is unclear; it might be due to
the fact that the reported incidence of chlamydia, a bacterial STD that
causes infertility, is several times higher in Iran than in Western
countries. Former president Mahmud Ahmadinejad began campaigning for
earlier marriage and bigger families in 2009, but fertility has
continued to fall.

I argued nearly a decade ago (see Demographics and Iran's imperial design,
Asia Times Online, September 13, 2005) that Iran's decision to acquire
nuclear weapons is an entirely rational response to its demographic
decline: "Iran's motives for acquiring nuclear power are not only
economic but strategic. Like Hitler and Stalin, Ahmadinejad looks to
imperial expansion as a solution for economic crisis at home. ... This
may appear to be a desperate gamble, but conditions call for desperate
gambles. Ahmadinejad is not a throwback, as I wrote with a
dismissiveness that seems painful in hindsight. He has taken the measure
of his country's crisis, and determined to meet it head-on. Washington,
from what I can tell, has no idea what sort of opponent it confronts."

Iran is rational, but not in the way Obama seems to believe. If you need
$100,000 for an operation that will save your life and have only
$10,000, it is rational to bet the whole stake at 10:1 odds. Iran must
break out or break down. That is why it will gamble on nuclear weapons
acquisition.

Total fertility rate for Russia, Ukraine, and IranSource: UN and CIA

Apart from some fine work by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, though,
the glaring facts of Iran's demographic predicament have escaped notice
by America's policymakers. Not so the demographics of Russia: the
prevailing view among Western analysts (and especially hawkish ones)
holds that Russia is a doomed nation. In December 2011, Professor
Eberstadt published an essay entitled "The Dying Bear: Russia's
Demographic Disaster" in Foreign Affairs. Last year I reviewed on this site Ilan Berman's book Implosion, which stated this widely held view as follows:

Russia is dying. Russia is undergoing a catastrophic post-Soviet
societal decline due to abysmal health standards, runaway drug
addiction, and an AIDS crisis that officials have termed an "epidemic."
The population of the Russian Federation is declining by close to half a
million souls every year due to death and emigration. At this rate, the
once-mighty Russian state could lose a quarter of its population by the
middle of this century. And according to some projections, if Russia's
demographic trajectory does not change, its population could plummet to
as little as fifty-two million people by 2080. It's a phenomenon
demographers have described as "the emptying of Russia" - a wholesale
implosion of Russia's human capital and a collapse of its prospects as a
viable modern state. (See Reports of Russia's death are exaggerated, Asia Times Online, October 15, 2013).

A specter is haunting Russia: the specter of depopulation. The cohort of
Russian women of child-bearing age is so depleted that even a recovery
of Russia's birth rate will not forestall severe problems. Nonetheless I
thought Berman's thesis one-sided and overstated. Russia's total
fertility rate has recovered from around 1.2 a decade ago to 1.7 last
year, and Russia's population increased slightly in 2013 for the first
time in almost two decades.

We do not know quite why this has occurred, but it seems that Putin's
aggressive efforts to promote fertility have had some effect - unlike in
Iran. Like Jonah's prophecy to Nineveh, the threat of extinction may
have motivated Russia to change course. And like Jonah, our modern
prophets rankle at the prospect that the ban of doom may have been
lifted.

I suspect that Russia's revived nationalism has a great deal to do with
rising fertility. That includes the revival of the Orthodox Church,
which is consubstantial with the Russian state. Countries that lose
their faith and their identity also lose their motivation to bring new
generations into the world; that is how civilizations die, the title of
my 2011 book on demographics and geopolitics. Putin's nationalism is
also a rational response to an existential threat. The Germans might go
gentle into that good night, but Russia will fight for its identity and
its future existence.

Russian nationalism - historically an imperial
more than a national identity - always was a brutal business, and
especially nasty towards national minorities, as my ancestors from the
Pale of Jewish Settlement on the Western order of the Russian Empire
knew all too well.

A core goal of Putin's national revivalism is the reintegration of
Russians left stranded in the "near abroad" by the collapse of the
Soviet Union: Russia's imperial policy of salting its border states with
Russian settlers backfired when the evil Soviet empire collapsed. From
the Russian vantage point this is not a matter of scoring points but an
existential issue, a sine qua non of what it means to be Russian, and exemplary of the motivation for Russians to want their culture to continue.

Western pundits ridicule
Putin's claim that Russia is a bulwark against Western decadence. From a
Western standpoint, Putin's methods are repugnant. But they are the
only methods Russia has ever known. The problem is that Western Europe
is decadent. Most European countries are headed for demographic
extinction. Russia, which seemed passed the point of no return, is
struggling to retrace its steps.

Total Fertility Rate for Russia and Selected European CountriesSource: UN and CIA

That leaves the West with a conundrum concerning the Russian
intervention in Crimea and possibly elsewhere in Russian-majority areas
in Ukraine. Russia does not want to be like other European countries.
Hungary, Poland, and the Baltic States have the lowest fertility rates
of any nations in the West, ranging from just 0.82 children per female
for ethnic Magyars in Hungary (excluding the Roma) to about 1.2 for
Poland. That is where Russia was in 2000. Russia prefers the fecund past
to the bleak future of the Europeans. That is why the nations of Europe
fought the First World War 100 years ago: to avoid becoming what they
are today. They fought to sustain belief in their destiny as nations.
As Col. Peters said in the cited interview, "Putin believes in Russia's
destiny."

The re-assertion of Russian identity, meanwhile, is as brutal a business
as Russian self-assertion has been since the time of Peter the Great.
Putin's patriotism is not my patriotism. I don't particularly like what
Putin did in Crimea, but it was delusional to expect any other course of
action. Russia is short of Russians, and it cannot ignore the 22
million Russians left stranded in newly independent republics of the
former Soviet Union.

The Obama administration is staffed by the sort of utopian liberal
internationalists who attended conflict-resolution seminars at Ivy
League colleges. Putin seems a throwback, and that is just what he is:
he is trying to revert to Russian identity prior to the 1917 October
Revolution, not without some success. To compare him to Hitler is
Billingsgate. The hawks seem upset that Russia has not chosen to accept
its decline with Stoic resignation. It is easier to condemn Russian
brutality than to suggest an alternative path by which Russia would
remain viable a century from now.

It was inevitable that Russia would intervene if Ukraine became
unstable. It is tragic in the full sense of the world, namely an outcome
to which the participants are driven by circumstances they cannot
control. Russia's interest in Ukraine, particularly in the
Russian-speaking eastern half of the country, is existential not
opportunistic.

As in Georgia, there was nothing the United States (let alone the
Europeans) could have done to hinder it, and nothing they can do to
reverse it. The tragedy will play itself out, and at the end of it - the
very end - there will be no Ukraine, because there will be no
Ukrainians.

Whether Russia survives into the next century is an open question upon
which the crude conclusions of hawkish foreign policy analysts shed no
light. I do not know the answer, but I am sure that America will have to
deal with Russia as a strategic power for the indefinite future - a
power of second rank, perhaps, but not one to be trifled with in its
back yard.

I am an American and a hawk who wants America to be the world's dominant
superpower. Whatever our errors, we are the only nation in the world
capable of altruism. We hawks had a mandate after September 11, 2011,
such as no-one had in America since Pearl Harbor, and we misplayed hand
after hand until our chips are nearly gone. If we fail to understand the
underlying trends that drive events and the motivations of the main
actors, we will be out of the game entirely.

What should we have done in Ukraine? As I wrote on February 20,
the West had the opportunity to promote a constitutional referendum
including the option of partition. If Russian speakers in Crimea or the
Donbas region preferred affiliation with Russia, so be it. Ukraine's
constitution was in ruins before the Russians moved in. The odious
Viktor Yanukovich beat the "Gas Princess" Yulia Timoshenko in a
reasonably fair election in 2010, and proceeded to abuse his
presidential powers. When the Maidan Square demonstrators chased him
out, Ukraine's parliament voted unanimously to dismiss him. The absence
of a single "nay" recalls Soviet-era majorities.

The West could have been midwife to a new national consensus - either a
single Ukraine reaffirmed by popular mandate, or a decent divorce on the
Czech-Slovak model, or perhaps a federal solution somewhere in between.
Instead, we encouraged a constitutional crisis in Ukraine. Now we are
stuck with the dubious Ms Timoshenko, one of the wealthiest oligarchs to
emerge from Ukraine's post-independence theft of national assets, and
an intransigent Russia in possession of Crimea.

Saturday, March 08, 2014

COMMUNISM You have 2 cows. The State takes both and gives you some milk

FASCISM You have 2 cows. The State takes both and sells you some milk

NAZISM You have 2 cows. The State takes both and shoots you

BUREAUCRATISM You have 2 cows. The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND (VENTURE) CAPITALISM You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by
your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with
an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a
tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are
transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly
owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows
back to your listed company. The annual report says the company
owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a
new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows. No
balance sheet provided with the release. The public then buys your bull.

SURREALISM You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

A GREEK CORPORATION You have two cows. You borrow lots of euros to build barns, milking sheds, hay stores, feed sheds, dairies, cold stores, abattoir, cheese unit and packing sheds. You still only have two cows.

A FRENCH CORPORATION You have two cows. You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You decide to have lunch.

A SWISS CORPORATION You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity. You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION You have two cows. Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION Everyone thinks you have lots of cows. You tell them that you have none. No-one believes you, so they bomb the ** out of you and invade your country. You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION You have two cows. Business seems pretty good. You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION You have two cows. The one on the left looks very attractive...

Friday, March 07, 2014

Edward Snowden testified to the European Union Parliament testified today. At least this is the say that his testimony was published. His introductory remarks are included here in full. This was originally published on the EU Parliament web page, including quite a few questions. Link in .pdf.

Introductory Statement

1)
I would like to thank the European Parliament for the invitation to provide testimony for your inquiry into the Electronic Mass Surveillance of EU Citizens. The suspicionless surveillance programs of the NSA, GCHQ, and so many others that we learned about over the last year endanger a number of basic rights which, in aggregate, constitute the foundation of liberal societies.

The first principle any inquiry must take into account is that despite extraordinary political pressure to do so, no western government has been able to present evidence showing that such programs are necessary. In the United States, the heads of our spying services once claimed that 54 terrorist attacks had been stopped by mass surveillance, but two independent White House reviews with access to the classified evidence on which this claim was founded concluded it was untrue, as did a Federal Court.

Looking at the US government's reports here is valuable. The most recent of these investigations, performed by the White House's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, determined that the mass surveillance program investigated was not only ineffective -- they found it had never stopped even a single imminent terrorist attack -- but that it had no basis in law. In less diplomatic language, they discovered the United States was operating an unlawful mass surveillance program, and the greatest success the program had ever produced was discovering a taxi driver in the United States transferring $8,500 dollars to Somalia in 2007.

After noting that even this unimpressive success - uncovering evidence of a single unlawful bank transfer -- would have been achieved without bulk collection, the Board recommended that the unlawful mass surveillance program be ended. Unfortunately, we know from press reports that this program is still operating today.

I believe that suspicionless surveillance not only fails to make us safe, but it actually makes us less safe. By squandering precious, limited resources on "collecting it all," we end up with more analysts trying to make sense of harmless political dissent and fewer investigators running down real leads. I believe investing in mass surveillance at the expense of traditional, proven methods can cost lives, and history has shown my concerns are justified.

Despite the extraordinary intrusions of the NSA and EU national governments into private communications world-wide, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the "Underwear Bomber," was allowed to board an airplane traveling from Europe to the United States in 2009. The 290 persons on board were not saved by mass surveillance, but by his own incompetence, when he failed to detonate the device. While even Mutallab's own father warned the US government he was dangerous in November 2009, our resources were tied up monitoring online games and tapping German ministers. That extraordinary tip-off didn't get Mutallab a dedicated US investigator. All we gave him was a US visa.

Nor did the US government's comprehensive monitoring of Americans at home stop the Boston Bombers. Despite the Russians specifically warning us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the FBI couldn't do more than a cursory investigation -- although they did plenty of worthless computer-based searching - and failed to discover the plot. 264 people were injured, and 3 died. The resources that could have paid for a real investigation had been spent on monitoring the call records of everyone in America.

This should not have happened. I worked for the United States' Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency. I love my country, and I believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must continue. And I have risked my life, my family, and my freedom to tell you the truth.

The NSA granted me the authority to monitor communications world-wide using its mass surveillance systems, including within the United States. I have personally targeted individuals using these systems under both the President of the United States' Executive Order 12333 and the US Congress' FAA 702. I know the good and the bad of these systems, and what they can and cannot do, and I am telling you that without getting out of my chair, I could have read the private communications of any member of this committee, as well as any ordinary citizen. I swear under penalty of perjury that this is true.

These are not the capabilities in which free societies invest. Mass surveillance violates our rights, risks our safety, and threatens our way of life.

If even the US government, after determining mass surveillance is unlawful and unnecessary, continues to operate to engage in mass surveillance, we have a problem. I consider the United States Government to be generally responsible, and I hope you will agree with me. Accordingly, this begs the question many legislative bodies implicated in mass surveillance have sought to avoid: if even the US is willing to knowingly violate the rights of billions of innocents -- and I say billions without exaggeration -- for nothing more substantial than a "potential" intelligence advantage that has never materialized, what are other governments going to do?

Whether we like it or not, the international norms of tomorrow are being constructed today, right now, by the work of bodies like this committee. If liberal states decide that the convenience of spies is more valuable than the rights of their citizens, the inevitable result will be states that are both less liberal and less safe.

Thursday, March 06, 2014

D'Angelo Barksdale: Now
look, check it, it's simple, it's simple. See this? This the kingpin,
a'ight? And he the man. You get the other dude's king, you got the game.
But he trying to get your king too, so you gotta protect it. Now, the
king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, 'cause he's the
king. Like this, this, this, a'ight? But he ain't got no hustle. But the
rest of these motherfuckers on the team, they got his back. And they
run so deep, he really ain't gotta do shit.

Preston 'Bodie' Broadus: Like your uncle.

D'Angelo Barksdale: Yeah, like my uncle. You see this? This the
queen. She smart, she fast. She move any way she want, as far as she
want. And she is the go-get-shit-done piece.

Wallace: Remind me of Stringer.
D'Angelo Barksdale: And this over here is the castle. Like the stash. It can move like this, and like this.

Wallace: Dog, stash don't move, man.

D'Angelo Barksdale: C'mon, yo, think. How many time we move the stash
house this week? Right? And every time we move the stash, we gotta move
a little muscle with it, right? To protect it.

Preston 'Bodie' Broadus: True, true, you right. All right, what about them little baldheaded bitches right there?

D'Angelo Barksdale: These right here, these are the pawns. They like
the soldiers. They move like this, one space forward only. Except when
they fight, then it's like this. And they like the front lines, they be
out in the field.

Wallace: So how do you get to be the king?

D'Angelo Barksdale: It ain't like that. See, the king stay the king,
a'ight? Everything stay who he is. Except for the pawns. Now, if the
pawn make it all the way down to the other dude's side, he get to be
queen. And like I said, the queen ain't no bitch. She got all the moves.

Preston 'Bodie' Broadus: A'ight, so if I make it to the other end, I win.

D'Angelo Barksdale: If you catch the other dude's king and trap it, then you win.

Preston 'Bodie' Broadus: A'ight, but if I make it to the end, I'm top dog.

D'Angelo Barksdale: Nah, yo, it ain't like that. Look, the pawns,
man, in the game, they get capped quick. They be out the game early.